One of the most convenient businesses to do these days is selling digital products. This is because digital products are easy to create and easy to sell. Organizations, as well as individuals, have started utilizing their skills and building digital products to sell. It is becoming an increasingly popular means of getting some income, which has the potential to grow without putting in any extra effort per sale.
In this post, we will discuss the benefits of selling digital products. We will then move on to describing how to sell digital products. By the end of this post, you will not only know how to create digital products to sell but will also be familiar with a platform that you can use to create a free website and sell digital downloads through it. But before anything, let’s define what digital goods or digital downloads are.
What is a Digital Product?
A product, by definition, is something that can be marketed and sold. A digital product can be sold online by allowing the customer to download it and use it in its soft copy. This means when you are selling digital products, neither do you have to ship the product to the customer, not the customer needs to have it physically with them in order to use it or consume it.
Hence, the usual definition of a product has limited applicability for digital goods.
Let’s take the example of the search function of a company’s official website. Would you call that a product? Is even the entire website a product? How would a marketer define the website? Would they categorize it as a product?
What a product really is, is an entity that provides specific value for its targeted audience. The one promoting or selling a product must know what value they provide to their potential customers. According to this definition, digital goods are also products. Digital downloads provide value in one form or another by providing users or customers with the information that they need.
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In short, a digital product is a downloadable or streamable piece of structured content that users pay for to get access to. For selling digital products, you don’t have to ship or post them to the customers. You also don’t need a retail outlet where your customers can visit and buy. Digital goods are sold online and consumed online.
Some examples of digital goods include paid ebooks, paid online courses, subscription-based software or tools, one-off purchase for tools or apps, and many others.
Benefits of Selling Digital Products
You can enjoy several benefits with digital products to sell. Some of these are explained below.
1. No Need to Keep and Maintain Inventory
Digital goods do not have a physical existence. They are consumed over the internet. In most cases, they comprise digital content that provides value to the users or customers by providing curated and well-structured information. When users make a transaction to pay for a digital product, they get instant access to it, either on the same website where they pay, on a separate third-party website, or in their email inbox. Thus, the merchant or seller doesn’t have to keep and maintain any inventory for selling digital products. You just need to have one item, and you can make as many digital copies of it for free as you like, as and when required.
2. It Saves Money
Since you don’t need to keep any inventory for selling digital products, you save a lot of space and money. You don’t need a retail outlet or warehouse to keep your stock. You don’t even need to hire staff to look after your inventory. All your ‘stock’ is on the internet. All you need to do to keep it safe is keep it password-protected, and hide it behind a checkout page to make sure people pay for it before they can access it. This helps you save on your expenses and finances.
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3. It Generates Passive Income
Selling digital products is a typical and most common way of generating passive income. Passive income is a stream of income that keeps flowing without you having to make extra effort per sale. This is precisely what happens when you sell digital downloads. Let’s say, you have a lot of knowledge and expertise in a certain subject area. You are interested in sharing your knowledge with others and see that as a good means of developing a stream of income for yourself. You find a video-making tool and start recording your lectures on the subject matter. Then you compile all your lessons, turn them into a structured course, and sell that course online as a digital product.
You just had to put in the effort to create the online course once. Now can keep selling it to hundreds of users or students without having to ‘manufacture’ a new piece for every customer. Once your digital product is ready, you can turn it into a long-term means of income. In other words, you can earn passive income by selling digital products.
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Tips for Selling Digital Products
Here are some tips to sell digital downloads effectively.
1. Produce a Quality Digital Product
Since you only have to put in effort one time to create a digital product, you might as well put in your best effort to make the most sales. This is important because people can usually find all kinds of data and information on the internet for free. If you are selling digital products, you are charging users money for the content in your product. Thus the content you give out in exchange for their money must be worthy and valuable enough for users to feel like paying for it.
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2. Sell on a User-Friendly Platform
It not only matters what you sell but also where you sell it. If your digital product is awesome, but you’re selling it on a lousy website, you probably won’t make many sales. You might not be able to make any sales at all. But if you use a user-friendly website or platform to promote your digital downloads, you’ll be able to at least attract traffic to your landing page easily. Once someone reads your digital product description, it is up to them to decide whether they want to buy it or not. But at least you got them to read the description!
3. Regularly Update Your Digital Product
Knowing how to create digital products to sell doesn’t mean you leave your digital downloads ignored for years after making them once. You won’t have to create them from scratch again and again, but you need to keep updating them to the latest version every now and then. Information on almost any topic these days can get outdated very easily. You must keep a watch and make sure your digital downloads are always relevant to the audience they’re being promoted to.
Selling Digital Products on Strikingly
Strikingly is a platform for building websites of all types. We have a lot of ready-made website templates for you to use, which save you time in the process of designing your site. We have several online store templates that you can use for selling digital products.
The feature-rich characteristics of our platform make it convenient for our users to build all sorts of websites and maintain them without any hassle. We provide you with a code-free editor where you can edit, change or update your site’s content any time you like. For accepting payments on your sales, we offer a few different payment gateways to accept payments on your sales that allow you to turn a simple website into an eCommerce store.
Image taken from Strikingly
For selling digital products, it is best to use one of our store templates. Once you are in your Strikingly editor, take the following steps.
- Click ‘Add New Section’ and select ‘Simple Store’.
- Now click ‘Simple Store’ and select ‘Products’.
- Click the button ‘Add New Product’ that appears.
- You will now find yourself in the product editor.
- Select ‘Digital Download’ as your product type.
- Type in the description for your digital product.
- Add an image and set the price.
- Click ‘Save’.
You are now ready to make sales. Of course, don’t forget to select a payment gateway through which your customers will make the transactions. On Strikingly, you don’t have to deal with any coding or programming efforts for selling digital products. It’s like you can have your own mini-store of digital downloads set up with just a few clicks. As long as you know how to create digital products to sell, you can easily make a website on Strikingly, turn it into an online store and start selling your digital goods right away.
If you haven’t yet done so, sign up for your free account on Strikingly today. We have ready-to-use templates for regular online stores and other types of websites. It has never been easier to make sales of any product online!
